Born in 1943 in Santiago de Chile (CL)
Lives and works in Santiago (CL)
1979
Color video, not sound
durée : 4' 45''
Year of Purchase: 2009
Lotty Rosenfeld was an active member of the Chilean collective CADA (Colective Acciones de Arte) created in 1979 as a reaction to Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile. The group staged multiple public actions, associating social activism with certain forms of performance and conceptual art. It was in this context that Lotty Rosenfeld developed her polymorphous work, striving to challenge various forms of power and to shed light on areas of conflict with marginal and individual positions, generated and perpetuated by the authorities. Operating at the limits and at the boundaries, her performances, videos, and installations directly set themselves against the brutality of the authoritarian social order. The video Une milla de cruces sobre el pavimento, shot in 1979 in Santiago, is a record of a public performance. The video follows the artist’s progress as she places pieces of white tape across the discontinuous white lines separating the lanes in the road. She thus transforms the demarcating lines into a succession of crosses. At first glance, this might be interpreted as a landscape intervention. It constitutes a practice based on the repetition of a geometrical motif, the cross, with an obvious complex of references, including the Christian symbol of sacrifice and redemption, the funerary sign, but also an accidental encounter of verticality and horizontality, a clash of contraries: the sky and the earth, good and evil, man and woman, etc. From primitive peoples to Rosicrucian mystical initiates, the cross has been used to represent physical and spiritual unity.
However, beyond the formal aspect of the work, what motivates the artist is directly political. She intervenes symbolically in a space controlled by a social regime, by subverting a functional sign that organizes everyday circulation of traffic and controls the flux of bodies. Rosenfeld replaces the regulatory code with another, transgressive one which remains undetermined with regards to the commonly recognized and accepted norm. It is an act of graphic guerilla reinforced by the anonymous character of the gesture which resists being circumscribed within the domain of art and creativity by those who see it and experience it. The artist repeated this action in a nomadic way, always outside artistic institution, privileging strategic or symbolic sites, as in Berlin, at the Plaza de la Revolucion in Havana, or in front of the White House in Washington, D.C., all of which are included in the photographic and video archive acquired by FRAC Lorraine. Rosenfeld’s recurrent use of the cross motif—her “critical weapon”—draws on the techniques of disobedience, of non-submission to the linear, delimiting order of things, and at the same time serves as a symbol for encountering and reappropriating public space. Outside these particular contexts, Lotty Rosenfeld’s gesture could also be seen as a more general metaphor for the position of the artist who marks an overdetermined space with signs of unbridled individuality, thus challenging the linear ordering of the world and assuming the role of the eternal outsider amidst the collective.
Guillaume Désanges